Given at BarcampMilwaukee5 on Oct. 2, 2010, Whil Hentzen leads a very frank discussion of what it takes to take on other people's software babies.

From: http://barcampmilwaukee.com/session/so-youve-inherited-someone-elses-software-application

There are tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of legacy applications out there, ranging from Cobol to FoxPro for DOS to Microsoft Access to Paradox to Advanced Revelation. Maybe even a couple Visual Basic 6 systems.

Unfortunately, there aren't tens or hundreds of thousands of legacy developers to maintain those applications. Most likely, the original developer of the application you're now looking at is long gone. The application is â potentially â now yours. But this situation is fraught with peril.

You want to avoid that peril, don't you?

Fifty one tips and tricks, ranging from pedantic, overbearing and over-generalized philosophical rants to detailed examples using software you've never heard of, that will help you get through yet another night of dealing with The App From Hell that got dumped on your lap just before you were headed out for a week's vacation.

Or something like that.


This audio is part of the collection: Community Audio
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Artist/Composer: Whil Hentzen
Keywords: Whil; Programming; Barcamp; BarcampMIlwaukee5; BarcampMilwaukee

Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0

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